In Bill Gertz's most recent Washington Times Inside The Ring dispatch, there's the following interesting tidbit of information:
ISIL: DEATH TO AMERICANS
The al Qaeda offshoot that has taken over large parts of Iraq this month has launched a global propaganda campaign threatening attacks on Americans if the United States intervenes in the conflict. The campaign, by backers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as ISIS, launched Monday on Twitter.
The campaign, in both English and Arabic, is being watched closely by U.S. and allied intelligence agencies concerned about terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests related to the conflict in Iraq and Syria.
The effort will seek to sow fear and incite attacks and will use images of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center with its messaging.
The group is signaling that if the U.S. intervenes in Iraq, all U.S. citizens will become targets for Sunni jihadists. Any U.S. attack on Iraq will be the basis for the terrorist strikes, along with U.S. friends and allies who offer support or bases for American forces.
Other potential targets include U.S. embassies and companies that employ Americans. One jihadist promised “rivers of blood” in attacks that would include women and children. A U.S. official said the campaign is being watched but so far has not gained traction among other large numbers of jihadists.
Meanwhile, ISIL this week published the fourth edition of its English-language magazine “Islamic State Report,” which includes photos of its invasion of central Iraq and of the mass executions of 1,700 Iraqis.
The Obama administration already has taken sides in the conflict by sending some 300 troops to Baghdad to bolster the pro-Shiite government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters Tuesday that the first 110 troops have arrived in Baghdad as “initial assessment teams.”
“These teams will assess the cohesiveness and readiness of Iraqi security forces, hire headquarters in Baghdad, and examine the most effective and efficient way to introduce follow-on advisers,” Adm. Kirby said.
Reconnaissance aircraft are flying 30 to 35 missions a day to learn the locations of ISIL forces.
A U.S. official said the terrorist group has taken control of large areas of central Iraq but is not believed militarily strong enough to take over Baghdad.
[Note that ISIL = ISIS, i.e., Islamic State of Iraq & Syria.]
As any one following the news out of Iraq lately realizes, ISIS (ISIL) is a Sunni Muslim extremist group fighting to carve an Islamic caliphate out of Syria and Iraq that recently overtook the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. This so-described terrorist group of some 10,000 fighters is overrunning town after town in Iraq and taking large swathes of territory while the 900,000-strong Iraqi Security Forces run scared. While I won't get into here how absurd that narrative is in and of itself, what I will highlight is how ridiculous the idea is that this newly popularized Islamic extremist group somehow is interested in engaging in terrorism directly against the U.S.
At this point, three nations are involved in the fight against ISIS: Iraq, Iran and Syria. The U.S. has positioned the George W. Bush aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and sent some support troops and advisers into Iraq, but otherwise the U.S. is yet to get involved in the fight. Why would ISIS, effectively under assault by three other nations already, want to infuriate the American military behemoth with acts of terrorism against U.S. interests? Yet, somehow, this the narrative the world is being misled to believe.
Why would this be?
I believe the operational term here is: "Grey Terror".
J.R. Nyquist provided an excellent summation of what Grey Terror is all about in a 2004 Financial Sense column:
According to (Petr) Cibulka, al Qaeda is the child of the Communist Bloc and its rogue state allies. "[Al Qaeda] is supplied and trained by Iraq," said Cibulka in a 2003 interview. "But the real brains behind this global terrorist campaign against the free world – is in fact the Russian GRU. Moscow fights against the United States with a hidden hand."......Soviet Communism invented modern terrorism. The Communists trained Arafat, Mandela, Carlos the Jackal and others. To what end was this training?Some historical examples of Grey Terror on which I've written at length are 9/11 and the subsequent Anthrax mailings. I believe that these attacks served the strategic purposes of the Kremlin in drawing the U.S. into major military actions in the Middle East that have helped stoke anti-Americanism around the world. America is now viewed around the world, and particularly in the Muslim world, as an "imperialist, war-mongering superpower" that needs to be countered, something which the Kremlin has long planned to do via thermonuclear force. It's just that:
There is an old book by a GRU defector who wrote under the pen name Viktor Suvorov. The book's title is Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces. Chapter 15 in this book is about Spetsnaz's role at the outset of World War III. It makes very interesting reading.
Russian Spetsnaz commandos are trained as paratroopers, explosives experts, terrorists and assassins. According to Suvorov, World War III will not begin with conventional military operations, or even with massed nuclear missile strikes. On page 196 he describes "a series of large and small [terrorist] operations the purpose of which is, before actual military operations begin, to weaken the enemy's morale, create an atmosphere of suspicion, fear and uncertainty, and divert attention of the enemy's armies and police forces to a huge number of different targets'." According to Suvorov: "The principle method employed at this stage is 'grey terror'", which is a kind of terror that is carried out "in the name of already existing extremist groups not connected in any way with the Soviet Union, or in the name of fictitious organizations."
The Soviets never start a war. By definition, the United States or, more generally speaking, "imperialism is the source of all antagonistic conflicts of the present day world, the source of war danger."[General Major A.S. Milovidov, quoted in Soviet Strategy For Nuclear War, p.98]Accordingly, any future terrorist attacks against the U.S. or its interests around the world in response to American military action against ISIS should be considered the surreptitious handiwork of Moscow, especially given that ISIS appears to be a product Saddam Hussein's regime-as-it-was.
